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I’m on a lot of diet, fitness and health forums and follow a ton of blogs about those topics. I’m also an anti-aging fanatic. It’s probably one of my top hobbies. I love learning about techniques to delay aging and improve physical health. Hacking your body through diet, exercise and what you consume is fascinating to me. One of the reasons I love it so much is because I’ve been able to see and feel results that make me feel like it’s working.

Protein is a really common topic on the forums I read. There are questions about how much to get, when to consume it, what forms to use, etc. I find myself posting my protein shake recipe all the time for people who are looking to start on a shake to help increase their protein intake.

The protein powder I use is called Syntrax Nectar Sweets Vanilla Bean Torte. It has no sugar, no carbs, no fat. 1 scoop contains 24g of protein. It mixes extremely well in the blender and gets smooth without chunky protein globs left in the mix.

If you’re unsure about buying a giant 2 pound tub of protein powder, you’re not alone! Go to Vitamin Shoppe and you’ll see single serving packets of this exact flavor for you to try. Grab a few, they’re usually around $1.50 each and see if you like it. Those packets contain the equivalent of one scoop.

Blend in blender (Vitamix is the best) until it’s a milkshake consistency.

Now I’ll breakdown the tips and caveats of my ingredient choices.

I use whole milk. It’s what I prefer and what I’m used to. I’m also only using 5oz, so I don’t even think twice about using it. You can use almond milk, soy milk, rice milk or any other kind of milk you prefer. You can even use water, though I can’t imagine that tastes very good.

The protein powder I use has a very light vanilla taste, I barely notice it. It also does not have that cloying sweetness or a fake sweet aftertaste like a lot of fake sugar products I’ve tried. It uses sucralose for sweetness.

The Navitas Naturals Superfruit is something I’m trying out. It’s ok and has a vague fruity taste from the pomegranate in it. I love antioxidants and it only has a minimal taste. It’s pricey though, so don’t bother with it if you’re cost conscious.

I add in 2-3 large frozen strawberries for a little flavor when I get sick of the vanilla. You could add any fruit in you like, but I’ve found that 2 frozen strawberries is plenty of flavor and color.

I use frozen for the same reason I use ice cubes – the consistency and texture is better with a few frozen things added in. Also, if you use a Vitamix blender, the raw beastly power of the machine will add a little heat to the contents of the blender, so adding some ice keeps it cool.

I drink one of these every morning and am really happy with it as a breakfast substitute.

Small print: I’m not a doctor, nutritionist or dietician, although I see them regularly and they’ve all cleared this as being appropriate for me. It might not be appropriate for you. This works for me and could work for you. But maybe it won’t. Give it a try and see for yourself.

For the first project, I’m starting with a Facebook “suggested post.” This is a post that a page, or even an individual can make and “sponsor” or “suggest” it through facebook’s ad platform. People tend to lament and sometimes deeply hate the “sponsored post,” so I thought it would be a great place to start. I saw this ad and clicked it.

Someone paid for me to see this ad, I clicked it and it took me to Plated.com. It contained a discount code which I used to order $64 worth of recipes. This gave me 2 different meals, both with servings for 2. The original cost was $64 with $12 shipping. I only had to pay for the shipping because of the Facebook ad. That means my total cost for the meals was $3 each.

Due to shipping constraints, Plated is only available in certain areas. You can also get memberships to make the plates cheaper. I opted against that for my this tryout, plus I had a free code.

I chose the Provencal Steak and the Chicken with White Wine Pan Sauce. The Plated box came about 4 days later. It contained lots of things:

This is the recipe card for the chicken dish.

This is the recipe card for the steak dish

Ingredients come individually packed.

Wrapped individually.

Packet

Steak and Chicken

Ingredients laid out

Box of ingredients

Steak before cooking and recipe card.

Measuring herbs from packet. There are way more herbs in the packet than are needed to make a tablespoon, so make sure to measure!

Measuring Grey Poupon from packets. Surprisingly, the Grey Poupon mustard packets made just about a tablespoon when two are added.

They sent an entire lemon, just for zest. A bit wasteful, try slice it up and use to for something else. The directions don’t mention that you need a lemon zester.

Making marinade

Marinating steak. It says the marinade is to set for 10 minutes, but up to 24 hours. If we had known that ahead of time, we could’ve marinated the steak in the morning and cooked it in the evening.

Image from the recipe card

Quartered potatoes

While in the oven, it smelled amazing. The directions do not instruct to flip the steak while cooking. This is a pretty important step.

Arranging potatoes for roasting

Beans ready to cook

Oiling up some green beans

You should check your temperature! It doesn’t give recommended temperatures in the Plated directions, but it really should. You’re going to want a meat thermometer for this. Unless you like getting meat-borne diseases.

Cooked steak out of the oven

Vegetables ready for roasting. It will help immensely if you have two ovens and can roast the vegetables while the steak is under the broiler.

Cutting into the steak

Finished product next to the example photo. It looked surprisingly similar to the picture.

My actual finished product

This is a shot of the recipe card front

This is a shot of the recipe card back

My images show the “Provencal Steak” dish. It wasn’t difficult to cook, but the directions were a little lacking and some of the ingredients weren’t very intuitive.

Over all it ended up looking a lot like the picture, but the steak was a bit tough. Likely due to only marinating for a short time, when we could’ve marinated up to 24 hours. Plated isn’t about learning to cook. They provide pre-portioned ingredients and a recipe. Follow the directions and you have something decent. Learning to cook requires understanding what you’re doing, not just mindlessly following the directions. My cooking and dining companion actually said, “I’ve seen boxed cake mix with better documentation.”

The four people who tried the finished dish generally liked it, every one of them added butter and salt to their vegetables and said the steak was tough.

I split the 2 servings into 4 servings so my friends could each taste the full meal, here are their ratings:

Diner A – 4.5/10

Diner B – 7.5/10

Diner C – 7/10

Diner D – 6/10

My overall feeling was that this slickly-produced startup isn’t going to be successful. The website is visually very well done and the app itself works well. However, the directions need to be refined and the price is clearly only for a novelty. The ingredients are not rare, hard to find things, they’re regular grocery items at an increased cost, plus a wait time for shipping. It just makes sense for people to learn to cook on their own. Sure, some people might not have the time to go shopping, but at that point, why not just go out? I think the one aspect that would be worth pursuing for Plated is the gifting aspect. It would be a sort of fun gift to a family member who lives far away and then you could buy them dinner once a month, but they’d still have to cook.

Plated encourages others to post their meals to twitter and instagram with the hash tag #plated. You can check those sites for more pictures of dishes that their users have made.

I’m clicking on and purchasing from 12 ads in 2014. To learn more about this project, check out the introduction to “Let’s Click on Ads“

A lot of people online say they hate ads on the internet. They never click them, they use adblock and make sure to never, ever, ever see an ad. And certainly if they did see an ad somehow, they would never, ever click that ad.

Hate to break it to you, but we’re atypical. Most internet users do see ads. And some of them even click the ads! Shocking. I don’t really mind ads. I consider them the price I pay to receive great content for free. I’ve been on the other side of the equation and depended on ad revenue to keep my sites up. I value the fact that we not only get web content for free, but we also get television and radio for free and have for decades. All supported via advertising.

Not only do I see ads, I sometimes enjoy them. I sometimes click them or purchase something I found out about via ads. I thought it would be interesting in 2014 to really embrace advertising more. To not make them peripherial to my internet experience, but to make them central. To give ads importance, interact with them – click and buy from them.

I’m going to click 12 ads in 2014 and purchase from them. I see ads all the time and often don’t give them a second thought. While other times I’ve clicked and purchased things without really paying much attention. I thought I’d turn myself into that mythical unicorn – the person who mindfully, purposefully clicks on ads online and spends money.

Below is a list of ads I’ve clicked on and my write up on the results:

I’ve been happily using Evernote for several months. Previously I was using Voodoo Pad and quite enjoyed it. I switched to Evernote in order to have an easily accessible iPhone app with all my notes and information that could be ported and synced. Things had been going really well. Then they came out with a paper notebook made by Moleskine. The pitch is that you can take written notes and then import then into your Evernote app by snapping a picture. Once you’ve snapped the image, the special paper allows the iPhone app to convert the written notes to text notes easily and quickly. The lines provide an easier way for the app to line up the text and make a more accurate conversion. This seemed like a great idea! They even included physical stickers that could then be associated with tags. Put a sticker on the page and the “work” or “idea” tag you’ve chosen would then automatically associate and attach to the note.

This sounded so great to me! In meetings I tend to prefer to hand write notes. I find it easier sometimes to draw a little diagram, underline something or copy what’s on whiteboard. Further, I find that it’s much more personal to handwrite notes. I’ve been in the tech industry for my entire career and I’ve found that typing notes in a meeting gives the appearance of not paying attention, even when you’re diligently focused. Even I sometimes tend to assume that everyone is just browsing their email instead of listening. Thus, paper notes that can be quickly and easily converted to searchable, readable text seems to solve the problem.

Except it doesn’t. The notebook arrived yesterday and I couldn’t get it to work no matter what I tried. I followed the directions exactly. I was able to snap an image, but not able to have the image recognized as a Smart Notebook page or have my text converted. Of c ourse I assumed it was my handwriting and had two friends try their penmanship. Even the most lovely blockscript didn’t do the trick. I updated the app and tried lots of different things. Of course the Evernote support forums are full of similar complaints. It doesn’t work.

What a disappointment.

Further disappointment came when I attempted to get support. You see, the notebook I ordered was $25 and included 3 months of Premium account status. Evernote is a classic “Freemium” model. They provide extra features, priority support and no ads for a small monthly fee. Of course the sticker on the front of the notebook proclaims how lovely your included 3 months free will be, but nowhere does it tell you exactly how to activate the premium status for your existing account.

Now things go a little off the rails, but this is how they reached the top spot for my most hated company today. I’ve been using a little app called “skitch” for years. It was a great lightweight app for quickly adding text, small icons and drawings on to images. It also took great quick screenshots and allowed you to upload your images in a variety of ways. Gawker wrote up a bit about it 6 months ago (NSFW link). A few weeks ago Evernote purchased Skitch. Things stopped working. And with the latest version, it essentially destroyed the app.

The Apple App Store reviews are full of vitriol. My favorite complaint is “If you loved Skitch, you will hate this”. “This” being Skitch under the Evernote acquisition. I have so many friends that used and loved Skitch that a few even emailed me warning me not to upgrade or I’d lose one of my most useful productivity tools.

I made the horrible mistake of "upgrading" to @Skitch 2.0. This interface is AWFUL and resizing is broken! Anybody know a good alternative?

Then the genius CEO of Evernote responds to the outrage and disappointment with flippancy and ridicule toward his users. At the very least they could have done some damage control, but instead said “deal with it, jerks,” to the longtime Skitch users who have now been forcibly converted to Evernote users and lost all of the content storage they’ve been using for years.

Thus, Evernote ranks as worst company for selling me a useless paper notebook, giving me substandard level of support eventhough I’ve paid for premium and especially for ruining a fantastic application that I’ve used for years. AT&T has been knocked to third most hated, while United Airlines hangs at second place.

Well, it finally happened. I’d been happy without one, but I felt like I was missing out on too many important events in the lives of my friends, so I finally decided to join (and participate in?) facebook. Obviously there are tons of concerns around privacy and I’ve taken the approach of posting 100% publicly, when I do post thus far. Also, I’m using Ghostery to keep the creepy tracking to a minimum.

It hasn’t even been 24 hours, so I’m not sure how much I’ll be using it. Similarly with twitter, I’m sure I’ll forget it exists in a few weeks until someone asks me about it again or links to it, then I’ll remember all over again. It’s really amazing how many people are on it and actively use the site. I suppose livejournal is finished and done with by now. A shame, really. Livejournal has the most superior threaded commenting system I’ve seen on the internet. And it was completed in its current form almost 10 years ago. Yet in 2012, facebook doesn’t have comment threading at all.

If you’re interested in seeing more personal information like dog pics, ridiculous quotes and other things that are boring and mundane, feel free to add me there.

This substantially increases my social media accounts to keep up with. Let’s do the inventory:

I had a little spot on NPR Connecticut today. The main topic was about trolling but Parmy Olson who wrote a book about Anonymous did the first segment. You can skip to 00:31 to hear my part. It’s just a few quick comments about what “trolling” means.

The nice Italian gentleman at “Today I Conversed With” did an interview with me a few days ago. It’s up on his site now. We mostly cover things like internet culture, the future of social media security and the Semantic Web.

What future is waiting us, in your own opinion? Will be take measures to increase the security of our data or not?

I think that security measures will slowly improve, while tactics for unauthorized access improve as well. It’s an arms race. There is a lot more work that needs to be done, but that’s ok. There are a lot of really smart people working on these problems.

I got the below email today. Phishing is a problem, obviously, but it also tends to provide a lot of entertainment value to information security professionals. There are lots of fun little tricks that Phishers use in their emails. They hope to get you to click on their links and then send you to a site where you’ll put in your username and passwords. It’s fun to see how creative and how stupid they can get. It’s also interesting to see how little effort a lot of them put into their attempts.

This email is obviously phishing because it is sent to undisclosed-recipients:; and American Express would refer to me as “Dear Sherrod DeGrippo,” not “Dear customer.” The bad grammar and randomly capitalized letters are another give away. An appeal to “secure online service against any fraudulent attempt,” is pretty funny too.

Looking at the mail headers is funny too. Because this was in my spam folder and was actually marked spam due to my low spamscore threshold. It got marked as spam not for phishing, but for forging the MUA. Adorable.

But as with all phishing, the biggest give away is that the email doesn’t link to AmericanExpress.com, but to something completely unrelated. I’m also pretty sure that AmEx prefers really showy, ridiculously fancy html emails, not just a single logo at the top.

Let’s talk about facebook. I’m not a facebook user, but I’m familiar with the concept and have followed the IPO drama with a bucket of popcorn.gif. Today I read this thread on HN today. A lot of people are commenting talking about what FB can do to differentiate, monetize outside of ads, etc. My first thought is that it seems easier and potentially more long-term profitable to simply charge for use of the service.

We spend more and more time online. People host gigs and gigs of their personal photos, videos and thoughts on the service, yet no one thinks that this is a service worth paying for. Why? Well, it’s because of the ever-present-on-the-web concept that ads are the avenue to revenue. It’s all free, just with some ads thrown on! I won’t get in to my thoughts on how we got to this mindset that these services aren’t worth paying for. Still, it’s easy to see that the vast user base on earth spends massive amounts of time online but doesn’t consider these service providers worth a penny because they’ve been indoctrinated in a mindset that says everything is free.

Why hasn’t someone put up a competing social network and made it a for-pay or freemium model? There are some, I know (Flickr, LJ). But those aren’t a straight up for-pay social network model. What’s so wrong with that? In fact, I think if it were done right, a social network that came straight out and said, “Look, it’s $100 a year for lots of picture storage, lots of features and no ads” would do well. It would potentially be very well respected and on top of that have a bit of that closed cache that comes with services that aren’t free. It also ties users to the service because they’ve potentially prepaid.

Google+, Facebook, MS so.cl, Tumblr, Pinterest and Twitter are all constantly trying to innovate and create new features for users. Imagine if users were actually paying for services. Further, something like the “GM drops facebook ads because they don’t work” fiasco could be avoided. A user dropping a $20 a month service means almost nothing in singularity and certainly isn’t news enough to be in the WSJ.

Clearly I’m not an expert at running (or in some cases, even using) social networks and it’s completely possible I’m missing something here. But when there are so many legitimate complaints about services using annoying ads, abusing privacy, screwing around with stock offerings and frustrating their users, wouldn’t it make sense that someone has seen this ad-supported social network model and found it “ripe for disruption”?

I’m expecting the very contrary nature of internet commenters to benefit me in this case and give me some links to decent social networks that charge money. Send them along.

About

My name is Sherrod DeGrippo. I've been involved with documenting internet culture for almost 10 years now and have been in the information security field since 2000. I love to talk about start ups, marketing and information security developments.

I'm a slightly obsessive GTD fanatic and talk about the ways I use GTD in my every day life.